@aral seems like a two-tiered strategy. Not just embrace-extend-extinguish, but also divide-and-conquer, creating an ad-free access to FB and Insta content that, backed my their money, can host millions, eventually holding critical mass of non-Meta fediverse. Then they will put up federation requirements that will force the rest to join or get defederated.
And recent decisions which led to big masto instances growing even further played right into their hands.